1 Contexts 2 Culture As System

Notes 1 Contexts 1. The school is called differently in different publications: the Tartu- Moscow Semiotic School, the Moscow-Tartu Semiotic School, the Tartu School of Semiotics. In any case, the Tartu component, as Liubov’ Kiseleva (1996) argues, is undoubtedly central. 2. It should be mentioned that in the Russian language, the word nauka (and its derivatives) is more general than the English science ; it can refer both to natural sciences and humanities and to scholarship in general. 3. For instance, the metaphorical construction “Willows weep, poplars whisper” is presented as follows: A 3 (v 1 ,n 1 ) & A 3 (v 2 ,n 2 ) . 4. It is also noteworthy that cybernetics (derived from the Greek root κυβερνώ , to steer, to govern), intended by its creator Norbert Wiener as a discipline studying governance, control, and communication, is now associated mostly with the computer and sci-fi jargon (hence such derivatives as cyberspace, cyborg, etc.). 5. The works of the TMSS scholars were published in English in several collections, e.g., Sebeok (1975), Baran (1976), and Lucid (1977). A number of articles appeared in the journals Tel Quel , Semiotica , New Literary History , etc. 2 Culture as System 1. Cf. Sebeok (1991, 12), who states that semiotics “is not about the ‘real’ world at all, but about complementary or alternative actual models of it. what a semiotic model depicts is not ‘reality’ as such, but nature as unveiled by our method of questioning.” 2. Cf. Lotman (1977d, 9): Secondary modeling systems are “built as superstructures upon a natural linguistic plane,” or “constructed on the model of language .” 3. Translation mine; in both English versions published in 1973 and 1975, this passage is missing. In the Russian version, it can be found just before 148 ● Notes paragraph 6.2.0 and after this sentence: “Thus the analysis of Slavic cul- tures and languages may prove to be a convenient model for investigating the interrelations between natural languages and secondary (superlin- guistic) semiotic modeling systems” (Lotman et al. 1975, 78). 4. In a similar manner, Lotman (1977d, 101) asserts that artistic prose has arisen against the background of the poetic system as its negation, so the view of prose as “ordinary speech” and of poetry as “specially constructed” speech is in fact misleading. 5. The same holds for parody, which is also based on the “familiar- in-unfamiliar” situation (apart from literary parody, impersonat- ing somebody is just one example of the everyday use of parody). However, as Tynianov shows in his works, parody belongs not only to the domain of humor but serves as an intertextual device and a vehicle of literary evolution (see chapter 3). 6. In a similar manner, Peirce (1931–34) states that a thought “is always interpreted by a subsequent thought of our own” (5.284) and thus, “one concept is contained in another” (5.288). 7. Cf. Tynianov (1977, 337), who argues that meaning is produced between the shots and montage is the “differential succession of shots.” 8. Reid’s comparative work on Lotman and Bakhtin attempted to dem- onstrate that Bakhtin, usually perceived as a philosophical and schol- arly antagonist of structuralist and semiotic theories, has many points of convergence with Lotman’s semiotics. On the problem of Bakhtin and Soviet semiotics, see also Matejka (1973), Titunik (1976), Danow (1988), Grzybek (1995), Egorov (1999, 243–58), and Emerson (2003). There are several other works on Bakhtin and Lotman that are beyond the scope of this excursus. 9 . The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) came out under the names of Bakhtin’s disciples Medvedev and Voloshinov, respectively, and the debate about the authorship of these books has been going on for quite a long time now. The matter is still not resolved, and there are different opinions as to the degree of participation of Bakhtin in these two works. For example, Ivanov (1976b, 366) argues that Bakhtin is their immediate author. For our purposes, this problem is not of primary importance, and I will therefore refer to Voloshinov’s and Medvedev’s works as sep- arate from Bakhtin’s. 10. Cf. “Expression-utterance is determined by the actual conditions of the given utterance—above all, by its immediate social situation ” (Vološinov 1973, 85). 11. Cf. “Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the next” (Vološinov 1973, 102). 12. Bakhtin never clearly defines the concept of text and uses it sometimes with opposite meanings; in some contexts, text means the same as utterance, Notes ● 149 sometimes it is directly opposed to utterance, and in other instances it is synonymous with work. For a more detailed account of Bakhtin’s concept of text in relation to Lotman’s, see Reid (1990), Grzybek (1995). 13. Bakhtin most likely refers to Lotman’s 1965 article in TZS 2, “On the Problem of Meaning in Secondary Modeling Systems,” where Lotman argues that the problem of content is the problem of recoding (Bakhtin 2002, 610–11). Bakhtin might have also read Lotman’s 1966 article in TRSF, “Khudozhestvennaia struktura Evgeniia Onegina,” or Lotman’s description of Eugene Onegin in The Structure of the Artistic Text . It is necessary to mention that all these texts are quite different from the later book of 1980. 14. On the context of this polemic, see detailed comments in Bakhtin (2002, 610–15, 722–25). 15. Another theory that “originates” in formalism is the polysystem theory by Itamar Even-Zohar (1990, 88), who defines polysystem as “the ‘system of systems’ . a multiply stratified whole where relations between center and periphery are a series of oppositions.” Even-Zohar also refers to Lotman’s earlier works as emerging from almost the same tradition. 16. Peter Steiner (1984, 127) argues that Tynianov “saw literary development as determined mainly by the internal conditions of the literary system and regarded the extraliterary context as secondary, merely complementing the internal developmental causes by providing literature with speech constructions fitting the needs of the de-automatizing principle of construction.” 17. It should be noted that the formalists in their programmatic works criticized the study of literary history as “a history of generals” (Tynjanov 1977, 66; Brik 1977, 90) and studied literary development as an impersonal process. The TMSS scholars in many ways continued this tradition as well. 18. Cf. “The question of a specific choice of path, or at least of the domi- nant, can be solved only by means of an analysis of the correlation between the literary series and other historical series. This correlation (a system of systems) has its own structural laws, which must be sub- mitted to investigation. It would be methodologically fatal to consider the correlation of systems without taking into account the immanent laws of each system” (Tynjanov and Jakobson 1978, 80–81). These statements, by the way, seem to contradict the common critique of the formalists as focused exclusively on the immanent laws of literature. 19. The Fantômas mania among the youth is reflected in the 1974 film Aniskin and Fantomas , in which a country police detective named Aniskin finds out that behind juvenile Fantômas-inspired hooliganism there is an adult criminal who used teenagers for his dark purposes. 20. Personal communication at Tartu Summer School of Semiotics, August 22, 2011, Palmse, Estonia. 150 ● Notes 3 Culture as Text 1. Cf. similar approach to text by Roland Barthes (1977) in his essay “From Work to Text.” 2. This seems to be an exaggeration; for example, the text is central in Roland Barthes’s writings as well: “Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one. The Text is, I believe, one such object” (Barthes 1989, 72). 3. It is necessary to note that Saussure was most probably influenced by the German romantic theory when advocating the arbitrary nature of the (linguistic) sign. August Schlegel was the first to state that the signifier and what is signified are tied by a very loose bond and not in fact the same: “There is in the human mind a desire that language should exhibit the object which it denotes, sensibly, by its very sound, which may be traced even as far back as in the first origin of poetry. As, in the shape in which language comes down to us, this is seldom perceptibly the case, an imagination which has been powerfully excited is fond of laying hold of any congruity in sound which may accidentally offer itself, that by such means he may, for the nonce, restore the lost resemblance between the word and the thing” (Schlegel 1846, 366). Friedrich Schlegel expresses similar ideas, stating that if the criterion of truth is understood as the correspondence of the representation with the object, then the object has to be compared with the representation. But this is not possible because one can only compare one representation with another (Bowie 1997, 74). Novalis summarizes the problem in the following way: he maintains that the confusion of the symbol with what is symbolized (picture/original, appearance/substance, sub- ject/object) and the belief in true complete representation is the cause of “all the superstition and error of all times” (ibid., 66). Fichte defines language as “an expression of our thoughts through arbitrary signs” (Behler 1993, 264–65). Finally, Wilhelm von Humboldt emphasizes the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign by stating that all forms of language are symbols that are “not the things themselves, nor signs agreed on” but sounds that are found in real and mystical connections with the objects and concepts they represent (Berman 1992, 152–53).

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